Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/403

Rh work and wandering away from the plantations. The country roads swarmed with them, and with a vague anticipation of a great jubilee they congregated in the towns. Thus the South was not only in distress and want, but the complete breaking up of the old labor-system and the difficulty of getting to work on a new basis made the prospect of recovery extremely dark. The negroes behaved on the whole very good-naturedly. There were few, if any, criminal excesses on their part, except pig and chicken stealing. But the negro did not yet know what to do with his freedom, and the whites had not yet learned how to treat the negroes as freemen. The former masters were easily infuriated at the new airs of their former slaves, and resorted to all sorts of means to make them work. A great many acts of violence were committed by whites on blacks. But for the interposition of the National power much more blood would have flown, and the South might have become the theater of protracted and disastrous convulsions. The Freedmen's Bureau, an institution which subsequently became discredited by abuses creeping into it, did at the beginning most valuable service in evolving some order from the prevailing chaos, and in preventing more serious catastrophes. The passions of the war were still burning fiercely, and the restored Union, which manifested itself to the defeated Southerners only in the shape of victorious “Yankee soldiers” and liberated negro slaves, was at that time still heartily detested.

The contrast between the condition of things existing then and that existing now, cannot well be appreciated without a review of the developments which have brought it forth. No greater misfortune could, in my opinion, have happened to the South at that time than the death of Mr. Lincoln. He was the only man who, taking the perplexing problem of reconstruction into his hand, would